My American youth wouldn’t particularly have “predicted” that I
would make aliyah (move to Israel) as an adult.
True, there were certain factors that could conduce in that
direction. My parents were refugees from the Nazis, having fled
Vienna as teenagers with their families in the fall of 1938. They
conveyed that Jewish identity was important; we stayed home for the
solemn holidays, did special things for the joyous ones. Bringing
customs of another religion into the home — as some American Jews
were already doing back then for Christmas — would have been out
of the question.
But, on the other hand, both of my parents were from very
secular backgrounds, and Jewish culture in our lives was meager
compared to the immediacy and richness of American culture. I
didn’t know that Friday night and Saturday were the Jewish Sabbath.
I did gain a deep-seated sense that Jewish identity was important;
but I was less clear on why it was important — knowing
little about the Jewish people’s history, religion, literature, and
so on.
A notable exception, an irruption of rich Jewishness into my
predominantly American life, occurred when I was — I believe —
six. It came in the form of a birthday present my father bought for
my mother: the record Folk
Songs of Israel by Theodore Bikel.
Bikel — the actor-singer still going
strong at 88 — spent part of his youth in prestate Israel (his
family also having fled Vienna), enough to pick up sabra Hebrew and
the often feisty, high-spirited Hebrew songs of the era. As for me,
the album — and not only the songs, but some fusion of the songs
and the picture on the cover — had a huge impact.
(The album’s first song, and possibly the first Hebrew I ever
heard, is here; others are
here and
here.)
Not to put too fine a point on it, I was stunned. I’d heard some
Yiddish, but little or no Hebrew; I knew only vaguely about the
state of Israel (it was 1960, and it was only a little older than
me). My predominant image of Jews came from my own family, my
aunts’ families, and my immigrant grandparents in New York City
speaking German and heavily accented English — people who were
basically urban, part of a minority, and whose Jewishness seemed
largely a matter of guilt, anti-Semitism, and vague moral
imperatives.
But what I heard on Folk Songs of Israel — I would
request to listen to it by myself on the hi-fi in the living room,
along with other beloved works like Dvorak’s New World
Symphony and Bach’s Italian Concerto — struck me as
entirely different.
These Jews not only had their own highly distinctive, very
non-European language; they seemed also to have a brash,
in-your-face élan, the songs conveying an unmistakable tang of
joie de vivre. And what images they put in my head…
dancers whirling around a campfire; idyllic glens with flutes
piping; rugged pioneers trekking through austere deserts.
For these Jews, of course, not only had their own language,
their own bouncy exuberance; they also had a land.
I could see it — I thought — on the album’s cover, and not
only in the form of an agricultural field with trees in the
distance, but also of a smiling, buoyant woman striding through the
field. A woman with a funny cap, long braids, khaki shorts, and a
hoe slung over her shoulder. I would later find out that she was
actually an American model, the agricultural field situated in Long
Island!
But no matter; the picture was sufficient for the moment.
Although, even by then — 1960 — there were no longer many women
laboring with hearty diligence in the new nation’s fields, the
picture spoke to me on another level, touching into life one of the
deepest of Jewish archetypes: the Land of Israel.
It was this land — and this was an accurate perception —
that provided the fertile soul from which such music gushed.
I DON’T EXAGGERATE the impact of “the album” on my making
aliyah. Powerful push factors arose when I was in my
twenties. It wasn’t so much the Arab war on Israel; it was the way
the world powers — including U.S. administrations — treated the
young Jewish state. They shoved it around on the diplomatic stage,
blamed it for its own predicament, castigated it relentlessly it
for building “settlements” on land it had won in a defensive war of
survival. I was still naïve enough to be shocked that this was
happening so soon after the Holocaust.
But Folk Songs of Israel laid the basis in my life for
Israel as a pull factor — a place that beckoned, a place of song,
of fields infused with legend, a new life with a beguiling new
language and people. It was when I was 28 that this potent brew of
indignation at the non-Jewish political world and attraction to the
Jewish homeland, one might say, overflowed, and I found myself on
my way to Zion.
Today, a resident of Israel for 28 years, I still look back
fondly at that moment I first heard “the record.” While I would be
more ginger now about applying sweeping descriptors to the
variegated Israeli people and culture, I’m still struck by how much
the songs revealed to me, what intuitions they instilled at the age
of six. Life here has its ups and downs (perhaps more extreme in
both cases) like anywhere else; but I’m more in love than ever with
the vibrancy of the reborn Jewish polity. I can’t think of any
greater cause than being part of it and contributing to it.
I like to think of how its long arm reached out and found me on
a distant continent.
